Go Noles!!
As a lot of you know I'm a big Florida State Seminoles fan. I fully jumped on the bandwagon when I bought a home in Pensacola, but I've been cheering for them for a while before that. I love that team, love that school, love the fans and the energy. Everything about it is what makes college football (and baseball) great. (Sorry, basketball, your time will come soon.)
And as a lot of you also know I didn't go to school there. I graduated from UC Berkeley. And for years I was a die-hard Cal fan, until my fandom died hard. And I didn't just stop being a fan, I stopped being a Bear. I enjoyed my experience, I'm grateful for my degree, but it's not my school anymore and I divorced myself from that school and environment years ago.
What brought all this about? Well, the fandom breakup was pretty easy. Cal let a great coach, Bruce Snyder, go in the 90s over a minor contract dispute, instead of just paying the man. Then Cal stuck with this loser named Tom Holmoe for years when it was obvious he sucked.
That would have been enough to say goodbye, but then Cal actually tried to be competitive. They hired Jeff Tedford, they gave him a big raise when he succeeded, they even built facilities. Then in typiCal fashion they did a really stupid stadium renovation that bankrupted the athletic department. Then they fired Tedford.
Then they hired and fired Sonny Dykes, proving that Cal could screw up with good coaches just as easily as with bad ones. That was the end. After that, Cal wasn't my school to root for. They went on to hire another impotent Tom Holmoe and the team has been lousy ever since, with clearly no desire to get out of suck mode.
If NPR listeners was a football team, it would be Cal. They suck, they seem to have no idea why or any interest in figuring out how to not suck, and then they're surprised when circumstances turn and the school that want to succeed bail on them and leave them to rot as an ACC wanker team.
The program has no energy, not enthusiasm, no desire to even crawl back to mediocrity, and no clue. They stood behind an AD who isn't even an AD because the guy was black and they thought it would give them DEI points. And when they actually hired a black coach in basketball who was kind of good, they lost him almost immediately. They've had plenty of opportunities to hire competent black coaches and ADs, but every time Cal either chooses the clueless NPR white dude who sits with his legs crossed or the cringe-inducing over-the-top-obvious DEI hire.
It's not that Cal is at a disadvantage in recruiting or hiring, it's that Cal goes out of its way to slap the faces of people who want to see Cal football win and be an exciting program.
They pushed out a female AD who was actually doing pretty well (and has done a great job at Penn State since leaving) and replaced her with a black dude from an investment bank who knows NOTHING about running an athletic department. Because what would really save Cal football would be some good day trading. (And when he left the athletic department was in the worst financial shape its ever been.)
I mean, fuck. There are black people who are actually good athletic directors. Why not hire one of them? Or better yet, keep the woman who was actually good at her job and call it a DEI win? Why go out of your way to find the one token who everyone knew from day one was going to fail? How is that promoting diversity? It actually seems low-key racist to me, like the administration believes black people are inferior so they're going to find people who prove them right and then go back to hiring their derpy NPR dweeb friends.
So, yeah. Fuck Cal athletics.
But why Fuck Cal, the school?
It's not because of politics, it's because Cal is fundamentally a statist swamp colony that lies about who it really is.
Look at Cal's history. Cal basically built the bomb. There are few schools in the country more tied into the swampiest parts of the US government than Cal. In fact, Cal might be the worst. Apart from the bomb, Cal played a critical role in MK Ultra atrocities, as well as NSA and CIA domestic spying programs.
In other words, at its heart Cal is creepy, authoritarian, swampy and an ally of the worst parts of the US government. And yet from the outside you'd think Cal was this love-and-light hippie commie anti-war university.
It isn't. It's a war and oppression machine. It's the swampiest of the swamp creatures. The hippies and protesting students are window dressing. Professor Robert Reich, who is a Marxist idiot and an embarrassment, is also a head-fake. Cal props up guys like this as useful idiots to give them cover for the dirty grant program that funds everything.
It took me a while to see the truth.
The "free speech" talk, is nonsense. Cal has never been about free speech and nothing has changed, ever. But it was a great cover in the Sixties. By the 2000s Cal wasn't even trying to pretend it supported free speech. It supported heckler's vetoes, cancelled speakers and professors who spoke out of turn, and put its thumb on the scales research to achieve the outcome the swampy overlords demanded.
It went all-in on complete nonsense like "climate studies" and economic models claiming that endless debt accumulation would not lead to inflation or even higher interest rates. When I was there, the model was Keynesian, which was flawed, but at least somewhat attached to reality. When Cal switched over to the Obama Model where up is down and black is white, they proved they're not the slightest bit interested in honest research or objectivity, but doing whatever the Swamp Monster wants.
The Covid overreaction (to put it mildly) was the capper, and that's what finally had me divorce from this pile of swamp feces. They knew the truth, yet deliberately fanned the flams of the most extreme paranoid hypochondriac lockdown nutters, for purely partisan political reasons. They knew closing classes was stupid, but did it anyway, because Swamp, Inc. and China, Inc. demanded it. Some people at Stanford were willing to tell the truth, but Cal shut down ALL honest research and debate, along with their classes. They encouraged students and staff to be lockdown and mask assholes.
So switching allegiance from a dishonest piece of shit swamp turd of s university to a freedom-loving, common-sense Florida school was pretty easy. All the more so because this school truly cares about winning at the high levels, and has done so. Yes, some of the expectations of the fan base can be annoying, but it sure beats the clueless loser mentality of the handful of Cal fans. That was pitiful.
So yeah, I got my degree from Cal, but it's no longer my school. Because I learned things out of school that changed my viewpoint. Loyalty is earned, not given. The only thing Cal has earned is complete disdain. So fuck Cal.
No comments:
Post a Comment